Thinking infrastructurally about migration

Managed retreat?

How about the next article on the merits of degrowth begins with this paragraph. . .

Reframing migration crises

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                         Thinking infrastructurally about migration

I

Thinking infrastructurally about migrants typically short-cuts to the stresses and strains they bode for a site’s infrastructures, i.e., the added demands they impose on water supplies, transportation, energy, healthcare and the social protection systems, be that site a city, region or nation.

Attempts at itemizing the benefit side of having migrants–by virtue of added economic growth and increased tax revenues–look more and more feeble these days in the face of calls for degrowth and populist pressures against more government.

Shift this frame of reference, however, and matters start to look very different.

II

Historically, diasporic immigration worldwide has had its irreversible impacts. (Think: the transoceanic slave trades.) One such irreversibility has been that immigrants and infrastructures have developed together, with worldwide as the level and unit of analysis.

Rather than a priori stressors on existing infrastructures, a better point of departure is the evolution of: water supplies with respect to immigrants, energy supplies with respect to immigrants, telecommunications with respect to immigrants, and so on. Indeed, infrastructures and immigrants render each other visible and tangible–unavoidably really-existing for themselves and the rest of us–in ways that the noticeably immaterial labor of speechifying anti-immigrant politicians and pro-immigrant advocates does not.

III

So what? In reality, pro- and anti-immigration policies have rarely been articulated in practical terms when it comes to shifts in the many different configurations of interconnected critical infrastructures, again worldwide.

The idealized concatenation of sequential and reciprocal interconnectivity–migrants leave home and arrive at their destination, and once there, interact with others–has been (if it weren’t always) much more complicated. Mediated interconnectivities of traffickers and remittances along with pooled interconnectivities (think: EU directives on border management) have complicated matters even more.

For example, the focus on shifting interconnectivities takes on increasing importance in the digitalization of border management, not least of which in the operation of Frontex, the EU’s primary agency in this area. It is argued that, via digital technologies (including AI), national borders are being securitized and militarized. Surveillance is broadened and changing dramatically. “Europe has long been implementing border and migratory policies that focus on externalising European borders as far south as Senegal or as far east as Azerbaijan” records the same report (https://datajusticeproject.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2023/08/Risking-Lives-report.pdf). Another report finds:

The removal of rescue boats and the increase of the utilization of drones is used by Frontex to detect and prevent migratory flows at an early stage, as migrant vessels are recognized in pre-frontier areas. In fact, the Frontex Situation Centre is a unit in charge of monitoring the external borders and the pre-frontier areas of the EU (European Parliament, 2018). The investment in drones has increased considerably in parallel with the deterrence of external rescue operations and the withdrawal of some naval missions in the Mediterranean, as it happened in the case of the Operation Sophia. Therefore, vessels that are capable of helping migrants and asylum seekers are replaced by drones that can only observe. In consequence, the agency has not the obligation to intervene neither rescue them.

https://centredelas.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WP_DronesFrontex_ENG.pdf

And yet, the complexity remains when the focus is on digital interconnectivities. A third report concludes:

Overall, the wide range of applications for new technologies implies that each one should be investigated independently, taking into consideration its development context and the unique requirements of the stakeholders who develop and use them. This report, therefore, debunks a totalising, black-and-white perception of the uses of new technologies. New technologies can be used for various purposes ranging from including migrants’ and refugees’ preferences in their settlement processes (as in the case of some preference matching tools) to profiling them through risk assessments or monitoring them through invasive tools such as electronic monitoring. While the former can benefit migrants by having a say in their migration and settlement trajectory, the latter can have extremely harmful impacts on them. It is, therefore, crucial to examine each use of new technology in its own right, considering its design and implementation processes and their legal and social impacts.

https://reliefweb.int/report/world/automating-immigration-and-asylum-uses-new-technologies-migration-and-asylum-governance-europe

Indeed, digital surveillance and recognition systems are very much a mixed bag of shifting pros and cons at the case level (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517211006744).

Yes, these cases of shifts in interconnectivity can themselves be inter-related, but by definition they cannot be reduced to one and the same case (there are, after all, separate nodes in even the most tightly coupled network.)

IV

So too when it comes to thinking infrastructurally about the diasporic communities of immigrants worldwide. Undertake a thought experiment. Assume today was able to send a macro-message to world’s diasporic communities of half a century ago. What would we say to them? At best, it would be about what not to do by way of their infrastructures, right? No more building this and that; but instead not losing more of those and these.

And when those of 50 years ago understandably shoot back and ask, “Just how is that to be implemented when it comes, say, to the digitalization you are talking about?,” is there any doubt whatsoever our replies would center around what’s taken to be ideal today with respect to the interconnectivity shifts, albeit in no way detailed enough for their cases?

If worldwide is your unit and level of analysis, then complex, thankfully, is as simple as it gets.

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                                  “Managed retreat”?

Managed retreat is increasingly recommended as a response to rising sea levels confronting coastal communities, cities and major ports. We already have climate migrants in coastal Louisiana and like places, and the idea is to manage this out-migration more systematically.

What’s missing are assessments of the track records in the various managed retreat strategies already out there. The management of moving capitols, for example, has not been without its major problems. Relocation of large numbers of people is even more notoriously difficult in humanitarian work.

What then might this mean in practice? One place I suggest to start thinking about managed retreat on the West Coast where I live and have done my research is the following:

Every time I visit South Sudan, the angels’ response to my criticisms never varies. “What would you have us do?” asked one exasperated aid worker as we sat drinking cold beers one night by the bank of the Nile. “If we leave, people will die.” He was right. A decade of government withdrawal from the provision of services, enabled by the humanitarian presence, and campaigns of government violence, partly paid for from humanitarian resources, had created a situation in which some people in the camps in Maban would probably starve if it were not for the aid agencies. The only solution the humanitarians can envision is to continue with this dystopic system.

Joshua Craze (2023). “The Angel’s Dilemma” (accessed online at https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-angels-dilemma-craze)

Imagine, that is, not a massive withdrawal and resettlement of peoples from the coastline but rather masses of people who stay behind having nowhere else to go practically and who need indefinite humanitarian aid in order to survive.

So what? Stay or not stay–either way means disaster preparedness.

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   How about the next article on the merits of degrowth begins with this paragraph. . .

We show that the rise in the share of immigrants across European regions over the 2010-2019 period had a modest impact on the employment-to-population rate of natives. However, the effects are highly uneven across regions and workers, and over time. First, the short-run estimates show adverse employment effects in response to immigration, while these effects disappear in the longer run. Second, low-educated native workers experience employment losses due to immigration, whereas high-educated ones are more likely to experience employment gains. Third, the presence of institutions that provide employment protection and high coverage of collective wage agreements exert a protective effect on native employment. Finally, economically dynamic regions can better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.

Anthony Edo & Cem Özgüzel (2023). The Impact of Immigration on the Employment Dynamics of European Regions. CEPII Working Paper No. 2023-20. Centre d’Études Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales (CEPII), Paris. (Accessed online at http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/fr/publications/wp/abstract.asp?NoDoc=13908)

So to be clear. The last sentence of the new article’s first paragraph is to the effect that: Economically dynamic regions have been found to better absorb immigrant workers, resulting in little or no effect on the native workforce.

Then follows–and this is what I’d really like to see–are the paragraphs setting out the policy and program details on how degrowth in those dynamic regions would work in Europe, given immigration, particularly from Africa continues even under (especially under?) successful degrowth.

Please note: I am not asking for anything remotely like guarantees with respect to degrowth’s impact on immigration. I am asking for more granular scenarios and more clarity on their assumptions from degrowth advocates. This way I can better separate out informed opinion from the rest.

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                              Reframing migration crises

“Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this”), Angele Merkel, 2015, then-Chancellor of Germany, referring to the migrant crisis in Germany and Europe.

Maybe in the beginning the influx was managed, but not now.

Germany initially met the increase in input variance with an expansion of process options (e.g., a major distribution and increase of migrants into towns and villages). But it’s the input variance that has increased massively since, with the pandemic lockdown, Ukraine impacts (e.g., more refugees and energy shortages), and all other disruptions up to and through the present.

So not surprisingly more of this is heard now: “We want to regain control of migration,” said Mario Voigt, CDU head in Thuringia. And yet that would mean controlling input variance, and since when have exogenous factors like war, pandemic and mass migrations been controllable in the sense this guy is talking about?

I may be wrong, but I believe these migration crises must be substantively recast and reframed, if we are to make them more tractable to policy and management (without, however, simplifying them or obscuring the complexities involved). There are a variety of policy optics to recast complex policy issues, including a focus on counternarratives, different methods, other-than-usual analogies, and key concepts around a more granular, differentiated analysis. (See my Guide https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18008)

Below are examples for each with respect to the currently understood “migration crises”. No pretense is made that these quoted excerpts from publications are everywhere relevant for policy and management. They are offered, with little edit, in the spirit of softening up what look to be obdurate crises that can be defined in no other way than currently.

I. Counternarratives

The discourse of apocalyptic climate change-induced mass migration is now past its prime. Particularly since the early 2010s, it has been extensively critiqued (see Hartmann 2010; Bettini 2013; Piguet, Kaenzig, and Guélat 2018; Wiegel, Boas, and Warner 2019), and the majority of migration scholarship no longer expects a linear, massive and world-transforming movement of people under climate change. Indeed, an ever-rising number of studies shows the opposite is the case: that relations between climate change and human migration are often indirect, small-scale, and taking shape in context-specific ways, influenced by a host of other socio-economic and political factors. The ways in which people move in a changing climate are diverse, and typically consist of relatively local mobilities (for overviews see: Black et al. 2011a; Foresight 2011; McLeman and Gemenne 2018; Hoffmann et al. 2020; De Sherbinin 2020).

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2066264

2. Different methods

Irregular migrants need to be able to safely report labour exploitation and exercise their labour rights without fear of deportation. We therefore propose creating a special temporary work permit – call it a ‘redress work permit’ – specifically for irregular migrant workers who have come forward to claim their rights and whose employment conditions, while working illegally, were found to constitute a significant breach of their fundamental rights. Such a redress work permit could be included in European laws either by amending the current Employer Sanctions Directive, or as part of a new EU Directive on Labour Standards for Irregular Migrant Workers in the EU. . .

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2022/702670/IPOL_STU(2022)702670_EN.pdf

3. Not-your-usual analogies

I argue that detained migrants become valued not only for their exploited labour, but as bedspace occupants who trigger rent payments from ICE to corrections firms.” “As detention occupants, migrants’ cash value for others is more than metaphorical. Formally and institutionally, they are made fungible, exchangeable, transformed from people with lives and stories into chargeable bed days.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/anti.129923

Beds have been the center of urgent political struggles — be they in prisons, detention centers, hospitals, or nursing homes. Our virtual conversation series centers “bed activism,” complex forms of resistance and visionary care that emerge from the intimate spaces of sick, disabled, detained, and imprisoned peoples. It connects a long-term vision of connecting communities and movements at the nexus of abolition feminism, migrant justice, and disability justice.

https://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/events/the-reciprocal-politics-of-bed-space-activism–creative-resistan#:~:text=Beds%20have%20been%20the%20center,%2C%20detained%2C%20and%20imprisoned%20people.

4. More granular, differentiated analyses

Between 2010 and 2019, over 2 million people have crossed the Mediterranean to reach the shores of Europe, escaping conflicts, persecution and poverty and looking for a better chance in life (D’Angelo, 2018a; UNHCR, 2020). Since the mid-2010s, this phenomenon, widely labelled as a ‘Refugee Crisis’ (Crawley, 2016), has been at the centre of media and academic debates, with considerable attention being devoted to the humanitarian concerns over search and rescue at sea and the implementation of the European Asylum System (Crawley et al., 2017; Spijkerboer, 2016; Vassallo Paleologo, 2016). . .Specifically, the current mainstream narrative is one that looks at these people as passive components of large-scale flows, driven by conflicts, migration policies and human smuggling. Even when the personal dimension is brought to the fore, it tends to be in order to depict migrants as victims at the receiving end of external forces. Whilst there is no denying that most of those crossing the Mediterranean experience violence, exploitation and are often deprived of their freedom for considerable periods of time (Albahari, 2015; D’Angelo, 2018a), it is also important to recognize and analyse their agency as individuals, as well as the complex sets of local and transnational networks that they own, develop and use before, during and after travelling to Europe.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/glob.12312

For migrant workers who do not have access to other means of income, the platform economy offers a viable yet exploitative alternative to the conventional labour market. Migrant workers are used as a source of cheap labour by platforms – and yet, they are not disempowered. They are at the heart of a growing platform worker movement. Across different international contexts, migrants have played a key role in leading strikes and other forms of collective action. This article traces the struggles of migrant platform workers in Berlin and London to explore how working conditions, work experiences, and strategies for collective action are shaped at the intersection of multiple precarities along lines of employment and migration status. Combining data collected through research by the Fairwork project with participant observation and ethnography, the article argues that migrant workers are more than an exploitable resource: they are harbingers of change.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-economic-and-labour-relations-review/article/platform-work-exploitation-and-migrant-worker-resistance-evidence-from-berlin-and-london/30DF1A5FD18F4B86983332ABE401E88E

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Even otherwise fine articles have text like this:

In summary, if we assume that individuals have 100% control and agency over their direct emissions and over all emissions embedded in their consumption, then the consumption approach is indeed a powerful framework for assessing responsibility inequalities. However, if we assume that the rate of control over the indirect emissions embedded in individual consumption (let us call this parameter α) is less than 100%, the mixed approach arguably provides a more appropriate framework. In this framework, α ≈ 80%. If α is assumed to be 0, then the ownership approach appears as a more appropriate framework for assessing emissions responsibilities. Note here that the ownership framework assumes that individuals have 100% agency and control over their direct emissions (we call this parameter β). However, in practice, the use of personal gasoline vehicles or home heating devices is often constrained. This is especially true at the bottom of the distribution due to location, housing type and/or income constraints. If α = 0 and β < 1, the ownership approach should be seen as a lower bound on emissions inequality. Of course, in practice, the α and β parameters might vary at the individual level.

An interlinear translation:

If we assume that individuals have 100% control and agency over their direct emissions and over all emissions embedded in their consumption [WHICH, OF COURSE, IS IMPOSSIBLE], then the consumption approach is indeed [INSTEAD READ, “TAUTOLOGICALLY“] a powerful framework for assessing responsibility inequalities. However, if we assume that the rate of control [WE COPE PRECISELY BECAUSE WE CAN’T CONTROL] over the indirect emissions embedded in individual consumption (let us call this parameter α) is less than 100%, the mixed approach arguably [HOW ARGUABLE IS THE CIRCULARITY?] provides a more appropriate framework. In this framework, α ≈ 80% [NICE TOUCH, THE VERISIMILITUDE OF THOSE “~”]. If α is assumed to be 0, then the ownership approach appears as [“IS BY DEFINITION ONLY”] a more appropriate framework for assessing emissions responsibilities. Note here that the ownership framework assumes that individuals have 100% agency and control over their direct emissions [. . .THIS WAY MADNESS] (we call this parameter β). However, in practice, the use of personal gasoline vehicles or home heating devices is often [“IS ALWAYS”] constrained. This is especially true at the bottom of the distribution due to location, housing type and/or income constraints. If α = 0 and β < 1, the ownership approach should be seen as a lower bound on emissions inequality. Of course, in practice, the α and β parameters might [“MIGHT”? MIGHT?? RATHER: “BY NECESSITY”] vary at the individual level.

I

It’s not news that robust communications are pivotal in establishing and ensuring situational awareness and a common operating picture in major emergencies.

For us though, communications are robust when they enable and enact the shifts in interconnectivity configurations so as to match real-time capabilities to dynamic emergency demands.

The willingness and ability to revert to and use different communication technologies in order to shift configurations of sequential, reciprocal, mediated and pooled interconnectivities is, we believe, under-acknowledged when it comes to disaster demands and responses.[1]

II

Please note the phrase, “robust.” It does not privilege or prioritize one type of interconnectivity—like face-to-face or voice-to-voice reciprocal interactions in field improvisations—over other types.

One cannot, for example, overstress the importance to enhancing both requisite variety and positive redundancy via activation of serial dependencies in shifting to contact trees and notification protocols in an emergency. “Like if I email you, and you don’t reply, I’ll call you, right? Or if I call you and you don’t pick up, I’ll text you,” a state resilience officer told us, adding: “Like if there’s an emergency happens, I call Chris. If Chris doesn’t answer. I call Coop. If Coop doesn’t answer, I call Abby. If Abby doesn’t answer, I call the governor directly. . .”

III

So what?

The way people communicate in an emergency constitutes the way they connect, and this co-constituted communication/interconnectivity, which makes things happen, means that different configurations of interconnectivity are often tied to different communications mechanisms and technologies. Otherwise you would not have sufficient requisite variety to match dynamic demands with real-time response capabilities.

[1] For more on these different types of interconnectivity configurations in pastoralist setting, see https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/01/27/when-interconnections-are-the-center-of-analysis-and-management-the-case-of-pastoralist-systems-and-interconnected-infrastructures-upon-which-they-depend/

April 29 2024

I

War is a hugely overwritten policy palimpsest, where all manner of arguments are glued together from the shards that have pushed through from the sedimented layers of argumentation underneath.

For our purposes here, it’s better to state this point from the other direction and in the form of a question: What has been obscured or effaced about war in the process of this overwriting? How might their resurfacing change current understandings?

This would seem an insurmountable challenge. How do you restore erasures? One answer lies in the really-existing complexity of the war palimpsest itself. Find optics with which to recast the composite arguments being glued together today.

The kinds of complexity I am interested in offer the great virtue of having no one, singly necessary and sufficient starting point. The test of the efficacy is, do an optic’s insights stick?

What follows is a example of one set of such optics. Thereafter, I discuss how this reframes one such war, the current Israel/Palestine conflict. My over-riding interest is to say something useful about Rafah and the looming offensive.

II

What did they expect of our toil and extreme
Hunger – the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream? 
Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,
Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication? 
Out of the heart’s sickness the spirit wrote
For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war’s worst anger,
When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense
Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….

I’d come across a World War I poet I hadn’t read before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” and the above passage..

The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminds me of an anecdote of John Ashbery, the poet:

Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s desiring—his hungering—after a dream in the end produced the perfect drawing. In contrast, Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me of a different story, seemingly making the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):

Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’

I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, What can be more perfect than the infallible image that emerges, unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?

Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to both questions: War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living–“Somehow together, and find this was life indeed. . .” Since when isn’t war a kind of life?, Gurney seems to ask us.

III

The notion that war is also about the irreducible particularity of living–more formally, the irreducible particularity of sudden contingency and human agency in response–would be banal, were it not for its massive erasure from today’s policy palimpsest of war.

I don’t know about you, but what I find said about Palestine/Israel compiles and stitches together every kind of statement–policy, moral, journalistic, etcetera–except those about the human complexities, individual and collective, in war that are already recorded in many novels, including some mediocre ones.

So what? Are we to wait for the inevitably nuanced novels of October 7, and even if we did, who believes they will have any impact on really-existing policy?

No, we needn’t wait.

IV

Human agency and contingency serve a much more important function than in service to novels. They are in fact a permanent–and as such, inevitable–counternarrative to existing forms of ruling policy and management. They erode anything like the authoritative statement said to hold here, now and regardless.They are, I believe, the key global counternarrative to policies, strategies, and processes that have, if you will, degranularised agency and contingency out of their macro-design narratives and scenarios.

Don’t confuse contingencies and agency for a grand narrative about human survival and persistence. Nor is the fact that humans respond to exogenous surprises and shocks in endogenously surprising and shocking ways a different grand narrative–in this case about there being different kinds of oppressors and oppressed or there being oppressors (oppressed) on some dimensions while oppressed (oppressors) on others. The counternarrative complications for policy and management go beyond that of any insider/outsider pluralism–actually beyond any creed and -ism.

V

How so?

Here we have a global counternarrative that humans insist on human agency even if (precisely because) their formal and informal authorities deny intervening contingencies entail doing otherwise. This entails Palestinians being in variable tension with Hamas. This entails IDF personnel being in variable tension with Israeli politicians and publics. This means that going no further than the terms Palestinians, Hamas, IDF, Israeli and like is unhelpful, probably harmful. Why? Because the analytic priority follows from the global context that the counternarrative imposes on all forms of authority.

This means that what happens in Rafah is global precisely because the granular levels at which really-existing practices of resistance and negotiation evolve there are among the practices that drive modifications of this planet-wide counternarrative. How could Rafah not be a global issue for any person whose living is war and whose war is living?

Note in conclusion that the preceding is not some a priori universal but rather decidedly empirical generalization.

I

Artists paint over their works all the time. It’s so common that art historians and conservators have a word for it: pentimento. None of these earlier compositions was an Easter egg deposited in the painting for later researchers to discover. The original X-ray images were certainly valuable in that they offered insights into artists’ working methods. But to me, what these programs are doing isn’t exactly newsworthy from the perspective of art history. (https://theconversation.com/how-ai-is-hijacking-art-history-170691)

War is a hugely overwritten policy palimpsest, where all manner of arguments are glued together from the shards that remain encrusted on its surface or have pushed through from the sedimented layers of argumentation underneath.

For our purposes here, it’s better to state this point from the other direction and in the form of a question: What has been obscured or effaced about war in the process of this overwriting? How might their resurfacing change current understandings?

This would seem an insurmountable challenge. How do you restore erasures? One answer lies in the really-existing complexity of the war palimpsest itself. Find optics with which to recast the currently visible composite arguments.

The kinds of complexity I am interested in offer the great virtue of having no one, singly necessary and sufficient starting point. The test of the efficacy is does an optic’s insights stick. From this perspective, any such insights are Easter Eggs in the overwritten palimpsest of war.

What follows is one set of such optics. Then I discuss how this reframes one such war, the current Israel/Palestine conflict

II

What did they expect of our toil and extreme
Hunger – the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream? 
Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,
Who promised no reading, nor praise, nor publication? 
Out of the heart’s sickness the spirit wrote
For delight, or to escape hunger, or of war’s worst anger,
When the guns died to silence and men would gather sense
Somehow together, and find this was life indeed….

I’d come across a World War I poet I hadn’t read before, Ivor Gurney. Which in turn sends me to his poems, which leads me to his “War Books” and the above passage..

The lines, “What did they expect of our toil and extreme/Hunger—the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream?”, reminds me of an anecdote of John Ashbery, the poet:

Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.

It’s as if Chuang-tzu’s desiring—his hungering—after a dream in the end produced the perfect drawing. In contrast, Gurney’s next two lines, “Did they look for a book of wrought art’s perfection,/Who promised no reading, no praise, nor publication?” reminds me of a different story, seemingly making the opposite point (I quote from Peter Jones’ Reading Virgil: Aeneid I and II):

Cicero said that, if anyone asked him what god is or what he is like, he would take the Greek poet Simonides as his authority. Simonides was asked by Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, the same question, and requested a day to think about it. Next day Hiero demanded the answer, and Simonides begged two more days. Still no answer. Continuing to double up the days, Simonides was eventually asked by Hiero what the matter was. He replied, ‘The longer I think about the question, the more obscure than answer seems to be.’

I think Hiero’s question was perfect in its own right by virtue of being unquestionably unanswerable. In the case of Chuang-tzu, What can be more perfect than the infallible image that emerges, unstoppably, from a single stroke? In the case of Simonides, what can be more insurmountable than the perfect question without answer?

Yet here is Gurney providing the same answer to both questions: War ensures the unstoppable and insurmountable are never perfect opposites—war, rather, patches them together as living–“Somehow together, and find this was life indeed. . .” Since when isn’t war a kind of life?, Gurney seems to ask us.

III

The notion that war is also about the irreducible particularity of living–more formally, the irreducible particularity of sudden contingency and human agency in response–would be banal, were it not for its massive erasure from today’s policy palimpsest of war.

I don’t know about you, but what I find said about Palestine/Israel compiles and stitches together every kind of statement–policy, moral, journalistic, etcetera–except those about the human complexities, individual and collective, in war that are already recorded in many novels, including some mediocre ones.

So what? Are we to wait for the inevitably nuanced novels of October 7, and even if we did, who believes they will have any impact on really-existing policy?

No, we needn’t wait.

IV

Human agency and contingency serve a much more important function than in service to novels. They are in fact a permanent–and as such, inevitable–counternarrative to existing forms of ruling policy and management. They erode anything like the authoritative statement said to hold here and now, regardless. They are, I believe, the key global counternarrative to policies, strategies, and processes that have, if you will, degranularised agency and contingency out of their governing narratives and scenarios.

Don’t confuse contingencies and agency for a grand narrative about human survival and persistence. Nor is the fact that humans respond to exogenous surprises and shocks in endogenously surprising and shocking ways a different grand narrative–in this case about there being different kinds of oppressors and oppressed or there being oppressors (oppressed) on some dimensions while oppressed (oppressors) on others. The counternarrative complications for policy and management go beyond that of any insider/outsider pluralism–actually beyond any creed and -ism.

V

How so?

Here we have a global counternarrative that humans insist on having agency even if (precisely because) their formal and informal authorities deny intervening contingencies entail doing otherwise. This entails Palestinians being in variable tension with Hamas. This entails IDF personnel being in variable tension with Israeli politicians and publics. This means that going no further than the terms Palestinians, Hamas, IDF, Israeli and like is unhelpful (if not harmful). Why? Because the analytic priority follows from the global context that the counternarrative imposes on all forms of authority, now and anywhere.

This means that what happens in Rafah is global precisely because the granular levels at which really-existing practices of resistance and negotiation evolve there are what drive modifications of this planet-wide counternarrative. How could Rafah not be a global issue for any person whose living is war and whose war is living?

–At that time: Which way Africa? Kenyatta or Nyerere? At this time: Which way development? Xi or Modi?

–“Which political conditions and cultural practices allow for the expression of fallibility?” Great question, but still: systematically misleading. As in: Do the conditions and practices need to be stable enough for the expression of fallibility or do their very uncertainties undermine fallibility as some kind of stable concept?

–Much of migration talk is about rights without accounting for any absence of emerging better practices across a run of very different migration cases, worldwide.

–If anything is universally ethical, it is to experiment globally only after having canvassed actually-existing practices and ways to modify them.

–Read something like, “Getting the Social Cost of Carbon Right,” and having to ask: Are these people barking mad?

–Xi should abolish the hukou system, expand PRC’s social safety net, enable workers’ organizations to fight for higher wages, distribute dividends from state-owned enterprises to the people, invest more in environmental protection, tax the rich, reign in imaginaries like tianxia, and, well you know the rest . .

No, counter the realists. Instead we should pray that China: doesn’t support a strong yuan, imports high inflation from elsewhere, suffers an even worse demographic crisis, witnesses the world’s largest real-estate collapse and experiences the uprising of the planet’s biggest proletariat. And, oh yes, the West should liberate Taiwan from China like the free-world coalition liberated Kuwait from Saddam’s Iraq.

The painter Gérard Fromanger recorded that a blank canvas is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’’. If, as painter František Kupka felt, “to abstract is to eliminate,” then stripping away the layers of black-on-black is akin to abstracting blankness. One implication: There is nothing more abstract in the art of change than “wiping the table clean.”

The critic, Christopher Ricks, elaborates an insight from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

“Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.” Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

This notion that humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive. That we start with unimaginable disasters and work our way to making them imaginable didn’t really to me.

Currently, we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. We don’t say, at least in my experience: As there are disasters indescribably catastrophic, we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to think about them. That way we frame what we think we know and don’t about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened here.

So what? Frankly, neither term, imaginable nor unimaginable, is good enough for the present. The skills we are talking about are those of making more or less (un)imaginable.

Below I cut and paste from an email sent to me yesterday by Scott Humphrey, Executive Director of the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region. It proposes an intervention that, I believe deserves wider distribution and application not just to marine infrastructures but to the real-time operations centers of other critical infrastructures as well.

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Several months ago, I did this webinar for a maritime security audience. The webinar describes the Extreme Climate Resilience Desk concept. I’ve also presented at several conferences.

Here’s a link to the video webinar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWOZtFDPZTI&t=3s

In lieu of watching the whole video, here’s a summary of the  Extreme Climate Resilience Desk SFMX video.

The concept focuses on creating a “Climate Resilience Desk” at the Marine Exchange of San Francisco to better anticipate and manage climate-related system shocks in maritime operations. Here’s a breakdown of the key points:

1.  Bold Initiative: The proposed Climate Resilience Desk aims to enhance real-time awareness and management of climate-related shocks to maritime transportation, much like current systems handle port security and maritime traffic emergencies. This initiative is critical for adapting to the ‘new normal’ of constant, unpredictable climate events affecting maritime and associated sectors.
2.  Case Study Analysis: A detailed case study from the San Francisco Bay Area in 2017 is used to highlight how interconnected and seemingly unrelated factors like maritime transportation, rice production, and rain can intersect and create systemic shocks, illustrating the complex interdependencies in regional operations.
3.  Water Management Challenges: The video discusses the challenges of managing waterways in the face of extreme weather events, such as the near-catastrophe at Oroville Dam in 2017. It underscores the need for an integrated approach to manage the reservoirs, dams, and spillways that are critical to the state’s water management system.
4.  Operational Interdependencies: The importance of understanding and managing operational interdependencies in the San Francisco Bay Region is emphasized. This includes the interactions between rainfall, dams, rice shipments, and the capacity of waterways to handle sudden increases in water volume.
5.  Infrastructure Needs: The proposed desk would use existing resources and data to support decision-makers, including pilots and tug operators, by providing them with timely, actionable information during extreme weather events.
6.  Leveraging Data for Resilience: By aggregating publicly available data and utilizing advanced GIS systems, the Climate Resilience Desk could preemptively manage risks and maintain operations during climate shocks.
7.  Stakeholder Collaboration: The initiative calls for increased collaboration among various stakeholders, including government agencies, emergency organizations, and private sector entities, to enhance maritime domain awareness and preparedness.

The proposed Climate Resilience Desk, through comprehensive data analysis and stakeholder cooperation, aims to transform how climate-related risks are managed, ensuring more resilient maritime and regional operations.

F. Scott Humphrey

Executive Director, Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region
Chairperson, Harbor Safety Committee of the San Francisco Bay Region

Office 415.441.5045   Mobile 510.393.6856

Web www.sfmx.org   Email ScottH@sfmx.org

10 Commodore Drive, Emeryville, CA 94608

We consider a timeless model of a common property resource (CPR) in which N herdsmen are able to graze their cattle. The model has been constructed deliberately along orthodox economics lines. . . .We begin with a timeless world. Herdsmen are indexed by i (i = 1, 2, …, N). Cattle are private property. The grazing field is taken to be a village pasture. Its size is S. Cattle intermingle while grazing, so on average the animals consume the same amount of grass. If X is the size of the herd in the pasture, total output – of milk – is H(X, S), where H is taken to be constant returns to scale in X and S.

Dasgupta, P. (2021), The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. London: HM Treasury: 221 (internal footnotes deleted)

After such bloodless abstractions, it’s a wonder more readers don’t rush to the anthropological literature for descriptions of really-existing pastoralists and their herding practices.

The methodological problem, though, is that there’s really-existing, and there’s really-existing. There are pastoralists interviewed and quoted. Then there’s the social figure of the pastoralist, a composite assembled by a researcher to represent the typical features of the pastoralists that have been studied.

All well and good, if you understand that the use of social figures extends significantly beyond the confines of anthropology or the social sciences. Social figures “potentially have all the characteristics which would be considered character description in literary studies,” notes a cultural sociologist, adding, “unlike ideal types, for example, which are written with a clear heuristic goal in a scientific context, social figures can also appear in public debate or be described in literary texts.”

So what? “For theorizing, this means. . .attention must be paid to a good figurative description: Is the figurative description vivid, descriptive and, as a figure, internally consistent? Does it accurately reflect the social context to which it refers? Therefore, the criteria to assess quality in theorizing must be complemented by literary criteria.”

And one of those literary conventions helps explain why the social figure of the pastoralist today is frequently compared and contrasted to the social figure of the pastoralist in the past. “[T]here are often antecedent figures for a social figure. . .The current social figure can then be understood as an update of older social figures.”

A small matter, you might think, and easily chalked up to “this is the way we do historical analysis.” It is not, however, a slight issue methodologically, when comparing your pastoralist interviewees today with the social figures of pastoralists in the past ends up identifying “differences” that are more about criteria for rather than empirics in “really-existing.”

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Source. T. Schlechtriemen (2023). “Social figures as elements of sociological theorizing.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2023.2281233)